The Bitter Truth Behind Sugar and Diabetes

Updated: Nov 7, 2013 - 1:45 PM

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The Bitter Truth Behind Sugar and Diabetes

You may have heard the phrase, “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” but could it be sugar that’s creating our health problems to begin with? With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicting one in three people will have diabetes by 2050, it’s something we all need to pay attention to.

Sugar, the average American diet includes more than 30 teaspoons of it a day; when it should only include six for women and nine for men. It’s a big reason why Rocco LoBosco believes he got type 2 diabetes.

“I was a cookie freak,” Rocco told Ivanhoe.

A recent Stanford University study found the more sugar in a population’s food supply, the higher the rate of diabetes, independent of obesity rates.

“If it tastes good, don’t eat it, and that means it has sugar in it. If you do that you will lose weight and your diabetes will go away,” Dr. Jacoby said.

Rocco has lost 34 pounds since starting the diet and has his blood sugar under control.

“It’s a lousy disease, but I have some control over it,” Rocco said.

In another new study on sugar, mice were fed a diet with 25 percent added sugar, a level currently considered safe in humans. Researchers found that female mice died at twice the normal rate and male mice were less likely to reproduce.